Chapter 4 - Paying Attention

Chapter 4 - Paying Attention

PSYB57Chapter 4 Paying AttentionSelective Listening Shadowinga task in which participants hear a tape recording of someone speaking and must echo this speech back word for word while they are listening to it o Becomes relatively easy after practice o Attended Channelmessage to be shadowedPresented through the right earphone o Unattended Channelmessage to be ignoredPresented through the left earphonePhysical attributes of the unattended channel are heard even though the participants seem oblivious to the unattended channels semantic content o The overall step of paying attention to the attended channel and ignoring the unattended channel is referred to as dichotic listeningRecent studies have documented a similar pattern with visual inputs o Visual Attention ExperimentIn this experiment participants were instructed to keep track of the ball players in the white shirts Intent on their task they were oblivious to what the blackshirted players were doing They also failed to see the person in the gorilla suit strolling through the sceneSome Unattended Inputs are Detected o Cocktail party effectdescribes the ability to focus ones listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises ignoring other conversationsPerceiving and Limits on Cognitive Capacity o Early theories of attention which suggested that we erect a filter that shields us from potential distractorsNot only are we able to block distractors but we are also able to promote the processing of desired stimuliInattentional Blindness o Defined as the Failure to see caused by inattentionThe stimulus is usually unexpected but is completely visible o Our normal ability to see whats around us and to make use of what we see is dramatically diminished in the absence of attentionConscious Perception Unconscious Perception